by Glen Duncan
No, Marta’s been a good girl. God really should be taking better care of her. But, as is the way of it with Creators who move in mysterious ways, He isn’t.
Any other time and any other place Marta would draw closer to the brazier for warmth. This time and this place she’s keeping all the distance she can. The idiocy of the question is bald, even to an illiterate farmer’s wife. Do you believe in witchcraft? No, and you contradict Church doctrine; yes, and you’re virtually confessing to occult knowledge at the get-go. How long have you been in the service of Satan? I’m not in the service of Satan. How did you make your pact with him? I have no pact. Is your unborn sired by a demon? No, by my husband. What is the name of the demon with whom you copulated? No demon, sir. Were you sodomized by this demon as well as impregnated?
Abbot Thomas, fifty-eight, tonsured and corpulent with eyes the colour of conkers and a ferociously irritable bowel, would rather Brothers Clement and Martin weren’t here. He has a fiery mind, does Thomas, liable to burst into outraged combustion at the slightest provocation. Marta, naked, shaved, innocent of all charges, already constitutes more than slight provocation. The thought of Marta (or Wilhomena, or Inge, or Elise or whoever), which is perpetual in the hot pudding of his brain, is perennial provocation. He’s a beautifully divided being, Thomas. A great, sane part of him knows that the girls are tortured and slaughtered for his pleasure and profit. A great and sane part of him knows this. But another part of him demands moral justification. Demands it loudly. Bellows for it. This ignites the fiery mind. (You’ve phoned in sick, haven’t you? Nothing wrong with you of course. Just can’t Face It today. You’ve prepared the husky speech, the wobbly or frustrated diagnosis – bloody flu – and damn you if by the time you’ve hung up you’re not sure you haven’t got the flu. Humans: need a lie desperately enough and you can take yourself in. Ditto with Abbot Thomas. The blades slide under the fingernails and the wretches’ confessions come pouring out. My God I was right! Infernal bitch! You dared deceive God’s holy minister? Thank Heaven I held to the odious task!)
The Pricker is called in to search for the witch’s mark. Third nipple, scar, mole, pimple, freckle, wen, wart, birthmark, scratch, scab – pretty much anything in the blemish family qualifies. The Pricker – crew-cut, long-faced, missing an eye – who’ll be well paid should he successfully detect a sign of witchhood (100 per cent success rate so far) spends a good deal of time examining Marta’s clitoris, which he’s not sure isn’t large enough to be unmasked as the witch’s teat, before noticing with relief the mole behind her left knee. (’I make this mine,’ Günter had said to her, kissing it, on their wedding night. ‘And this, and this, and this . . .’) He turns her over on her belly the better to see while I drop my flakes of flame onto the clerical genitals and Franciscan lust fills the ether like the odour of sweet and sour pork. The Pricker reaches into his pocket and takes out a greasy leather wallet. Marta’s tears (I don’t think there can be a God . . . If there’s a God, how is it that –) wet the stone floor. The pterodactyl shadow shudders, seems to elongate, then subsides. From the wallet the Pricker removes one of several bright needles of various lengths and girths. He turns his back to the now hot-faced Brothers, brings the needle close to the mole, does nothing for a moment, then turns. ‘My lords. It is my sad duty to report that this woman is beyond doubt a witch. I pricked this mark behind her knee and yet as your own ears will attest she made not the slightest sound.’ He hadn’t had to think about it. Long experience – that is to say years of pricking – had taught him which blots were insensible and which receptive. This wretched girl was practically alight with sensitivity. Prick her anywhere and she’d yowl the roof down. Therefore the report of pricking instead. He went in more and more for the reporting of successfully carried-out prickings rather than actual prickings themselves these days. The going rate was the same either way.
You’ll excuse me if I don’t dwell. The same questions, this time with torturous inducements to answer differently. For two minutes and eight seconds Marta holds out. There are precisely two minutes eight seconds’ worth of faith in her tank. But, understandably, after they’ve broken the second finger and the crucified Christ has shown no sign of superheroically coming down to her rescue, nor the Virgin of surrounding her with an impenetrable corona of maternal protection, Marta starts to blab. Not that that helps, since the Inquisitors’ agenda has nothing to do with her admission of guilt. The two younger Brothers, Clement and Martin, know it’s me. They know, deep down, it can’t really be God’s work to tear off a woman’s nipple with pincers. They know it’s me – but to Hell with it anyway, since it feels better than anything they’ve felt before, since there’s nothing, nothing like it on earth (nor, they’ll wager later, over the rough local wine and peppered fish, in Heaven, either). Abbot Thomas, on the other hand, manages on and off to wrap mutilations in psalms. There are flashes of doing God’s will like patches of blue in an otherwise dirty and flocculent sky. He can’t quite give himself over to the truth of himself, and his absurd oscillation between bloodlust and bogus rationalization is piquant to me, vastly to be preferred over Clement and Martin’s white bread surrender.
You might wonder, by the way, what God and the angelic host in Heaven are doing while all this is going on. Wonder no more. I, Lucifer, can tell you. Nothing. They’re doing nothing. They’re watching. The infinitely merciful part of His nature swallows a sob or two, it’s true, but the infinitely indifferent part keeps its gaze steady. There is a tradition, established by those blathering early martyrs and all but vanished in modern times, of offering one’s suffering up to God. The winkled out eyeball, the screwed thumb, the plucked tongue and toasted bot – the right disposition can lift them from the body and send them floating up to God like exquisite perfumes. The Divine nostrils inhale them and sweet indeed is their odour. (You might think there’s something obscene about it, but it will get you into Heaven.) So should you find yourself under vexatious interrogation one day, offer your shocked bollocks up to God. Next time your hole’s rudely invaded by a red hot poker lift your eyes to Heaven and say: ‘This one’s for you, my Lord.’
Marta, I’m sorry to say, isn’t offering her sufferings up to God. Marta’s providing her Franciscan hosts with confirmation that the other names they have on their list (Bertolt’s list, complete with colour of hair, age, vital statistics, and likelihood of intact maidenheads) are those of her sisters in witchcraft. You should hear her description – or rather her endorsement of their description – of the Sabbat. Christ, I wish I’d been there. Butchered babies, bestiality, coprophilia, necrophilia, paedophilia, incest (Abbot Thomas is looking forward to interviewing those twin Schelling sisters), sodomy, desecration of holy objects, blasphemy – a five-star knees-up if ever there was one. When this confession is read out publicly in three days’ time the good people of Uffenstadt are going to see Marta in a whole new light. (It’s going to put some pep back into stagnant boudoirs, too, so that’s nice.) In three days’ time, Marta, or what’s left of her, will state that this is her true confession, given freely, without compulsion of any kind (else there’ll be compulsion all over again, of a by now familiar kind) shortly before they march her up to the stake. Günter, restrained by civic officers, will watch, screaming, while they cut open his wife’s womb and rip out the foetus – redundantly, since mum’s going up in smoke anyway – to keep the mob happy and their crowd-pulling clout intact.
This is a Big Picture operation. Three hundred years, quarter of a million dead, all in God’s name. After about 1400 I barely needed to put in an appearance. The System was up and running. Everybody (apart from the innocent victims) won. The sadists got a piece of ass, the Church increased its loyalty to Mammon, the liars got paid for their lies, taverns groaned under the weight of drawn crowds, and the mob – the name-and-shame mob basked in righteous relief that it was her (bloody witch) and not them. Tell me that wasn’t an achievement. Not a patch on what I was warming up to, but you know . . . promising.
I really think God was annoyed with me. What with it being His Church and all.
There. I’ve dwelt, in spite of myself.
At a party to celebrate the paperback release of Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, Penelope stands in the shadows with her arms folded. She’s not drunk, not reeling drunk, but she is blessed now whether she wills it or no with that grim, fifth-glass perspicacity. Nor is she deliberately not adding her own contribution to the applause for Gunn as he makes his way to the tiny, elevated stage with its lone reader’s microphone; it’s just that her entire consciousness is given over to watching him, the length of his stride, the tilt of his shoulders, the pulled-in corners of his deeply satisfied mouth. She’s watching, standing with her weight on one leg and her left hand cradling glass six at an about-to-spill angle, while Gunn does his best, through gesture, movement, and facial expression, to appear exactly as he is not: unprepared, bemused by the attention, shy of the limelight, and incapable, actually, of taking any of this nonsense seriously. There has been a flattering introduction from Sylvia Brawne, his editor, to which Gunn has listened with his head down and his eyes glued to the floor, as if – Penelope knows – he is hiding chronic blushing. Then the applause, his faux exasperation at the ridiculousness of Sylvia’s hyperbole, and the back-slapped, Christ-how-embarrassing-but-let’s-just-get-it-over-with journey to the stage.
I’m there. I’m always there. Well, invariably. Not specifically for Gunn – there are other works-in-progress at the club: first-time smack for the eighteen-year-old rent boy in the bogs; the HIV transmission a philandering journalist is going to take home to his missus (who’s at her wits’ end already, and who stands a good chance of forgetting her pill tonight – having softened the blues with Dusty Springfield, a joint and a bottle of Bull’s Blood); the waitress who knows that if she goes home with the guy in the muslin-coloured suit it’ll be her first trick, that she’ll have capitulated, made use of what she can make use of (but Elise has done it, I keep reminding her, and says she’s never looked back – the holiday in Antigua, the two-bedroomed garden flat in West Hampstead, the money, the money, the fucking money she’s sick of pretending she doesn’t want . . .); the dear, muddled, bull-necked and swede-headed bouncer, who, as far as the rest of the world knows, is single, but who in fact has an imprisoned anorexic wife whose mere existence – plus her inability to quite absorb all his fear and rage no matter how many times he beats it into her – drives him like a disease into sudden, focused strikes, while the horror and claustrophobia and hatred and rage clash like warring gods in his skull, until he’s spent, and falls to his knees babbling apologies and promises between sobs (it’s limitless, his pity, as long as he himself is its object: Why does she make me do this to her? Why? Why? Why?) – so Gunn was hardly my priority. But I’ve tended, over the years, to keep an eye on Penelope, to rootle, now and again, through the clutter of her life in the hope of being able to throw something together. Never say die, that’s my motto. And never throw anything away, that’s another. Honestly, I’m like a womble, I am. Anyway, here is Penelope, and there, on stage, is Gunn. Are you going to say anything? Penelope’s asked him, earlier. No, he’s said. It’s all bollocks. I’ll just read and get out of there.
‘You always hope,’ he begins, trying to find that elusive middle air between the devil of over-orchestrated diction and the deep blue sea of his childhood’s dusted-down Northern vowels, ‘that the person who introduces you won’t make you sound overly intelligent or talented.’ Pause. It’s a small audience, politically hand-picked by him and Sylvia. ‘Otherwise the reading’s guaranteed to disappoint.’ Some friendly titters. Penelope grinds her teeth. Gunn is speaking in a voice she’s never heard before. Accent, depth, pace: none of them has hitherto belonged to the man she loves. Loved. Loves. (Who said ‘loved’?) Nor, for that matter, have the occasional grimaces of wry self-effacement. ‘Unfortunately,’ Gunn continues, ‘Sylvia has rather foolishly made me sound both intelligent and talented. Therefore my apologies in advance.’ Polite laughter, the general mnwoaaah sound of an audience saying, Oh don’t be so amusingly modest, you old thing. ‘Anyway,’ Gunn says, taking a calculated last drag on his Silk Cut and stubbing it out on the boards, ‘I thought I’d read the beginning of the book, so’s not to give the game away to any of you rotters who’ve had the good sense not to bother reading it yet . . .’
One is tempted to conclude that there’s something genetic in Penelope’s acute allergy to dishonesty, something deep, something structural. I’d prefer to be able to explain it away by telling a tale of a disappearing dad or a compulsively fibbing first love – but I can’t. Penelope is simply one of those human beings for whom dishonesty destroys everything.
And here at this insufferably pleased with itself and overpriced club in Notting Hill, dishonesty is much on her mind, as she observes Gunn at the centre of a small group of sycophantically tittering industry girls. Oh it’s not as if he’s feeling them up or anything (I keep telling him: feel them up, for Christ’s sake feel them up); but his vanity shimmers all but luminously around him. Again she sees the unrecognizable body language, the overacting, the disingenuous well-it’s-ajob-ness of his pose. Passing, secretly, at his back, she hears him address one of the girls as ‘my dear’; it would be innocent if it weren’t for how clearly she could see what he was doing with it, namely, connoting (however subtly – and obviously not too subtly for the smirking blonde with her dark-rimmed specs and piled giggle of hair) the priapicartist-to-nubile-muse relationship, which would be tired even were he thirty years the girl’s senior, but which, given that she looks more or less his age, is both ludicrous and nauseating.
It’s not jealousy. If only it was. No. It’s just a terrible, near-annihilating feeling of threadbare disappointment. All the hours and years. His hand in the small of her back. Be true to me, she’s said, unashamed of the antique idiom, because she’s known he understands. You will stay true to me, Young Gunn, won’t you?
Meanwhile Gunn is confounding me with the firmness of his resolve: You will not do anything. He keeps affirming, watching the light on her lipstick and the little corkscrewy bits of her pinned-up hair as they jiggle and bounce around her face. You are flattered. She’s pretty (but stupid) and you’re now almost certain that you could have her if you wanted to – but you WILL NOT DO ANYTHING – DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Much to my chagrin (blocked temptation’s like chronic constipation; not Satanic Rap – just the truth) he does understand, or so it seems. He extricates himself – No, honestly, I cried, blondie has tinnily confessed, just cried my eyes out on that last page – and heads for the gents. He knows he’s neglected Penelope. Glimpses of her on the periphery with unblinking eyes and the corners of her mouth gone trouble-coming tight. Why did he let himself drink so much? Why, in God’s name, has he just spent forty minutes so obviously flirting with Aurora? Nice tits, though, I persuade him to acknowledge at the urinal, where, in a surfeit of self-satisfaction (’. . .the poetic beauty of his imagination . . .’ Times Metro – cheers!), merely pissing in a straight line strikes him as a niggardly or unimaginative activity, and he begins slashing with a swing to his hips, accompanied by his own surprisingly tuneful version of James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’, a performance short-sightedly premised on the notion that he’s alone in there (apart from me, obviously), shattered in mid soul-brother screech by the appearance of the literary editor of the Independent, who, not surprisingly, gives him a pained smile before hurrying out.
And just when you think it’s hopeless, just when a lesser angelic rapscallion would have called it a night (the rentboy’s rolled-up sleeve, the journo’s husky mobile call in the purple foyer, the waitress’s successful rationalization, the bouncer’s stirred hunger and gnawing fear – all in the bank), a way through the darkness opens as Aurora’s fifth gin and tonic passes her tonsils and sends its alcohol by express bloodstream delivery to her noisy and irritable brain. Well, I only need a sniff. Go on, I dare you. You know he fancies you. Not
that you can blame him, because you do look the fucking business in that dress, babe. ‘You look like Nicole Kidman’ he said. (He did, too. Believes the non-sequiturial delivery of such judgements part of his newly acquired status as an artist.) Bernice said his girlfriend’s here. Fuck it. Go on – I dare you. Make a night of it.